I’ve never really stressed the big things, instead I torture myself over the little choices. Moving to Brazil was easy, choosing what I want for dinner, not so much.
I first met Cíntia in North Carolina, both on a study abroad year, both just out of relationships and not looking for anything serious. We went on to do two-and-a-half years of a long-distance relationship.
After my master’s degree, at 23, when long distance was just killing us, I went to Brazil to figure out what we were going to do, how we were going to survive, and if I’m honest, maybe I went thinking it would be the last hurrah. Instead, I fell more stupidly in love with her so that everything else became insignificant, and the looming problems were only distractions.
I didn’t know anyone, had no word of Portuguese, and in the first weeks back in 2011, I felt my independence and a sense of who I was slip away. I tried to get a bus one day, to downtown Porto Alegre, and people looked at me like I had two heads, the bus driver just shook his head and there was a general awkward laughter from the seats as I descended, unsuccessful and dejected.
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Months in, my Portuguese was desperate at best. I’d nod and smile along to conversations wondering when anyone would actually get to know me. Cíntia was working long hours and I was teaching English sporadically, so for large, concrete blocks of time, I was on my own. Or with Cíntia’s grandmother Irany, who had no word of English, but there was a warmth to her, and soon, without knowing it, she became my friend. We ate lunch together, told each other stories, neither of us understanding, but neither caring, either. We laughed, we mimicked, and soon created our own language of nods and hands.
I drove the streets of Porto Alegre not really knowing my way. Feeling lost at every turn, wondering when some building or landmark would become somewhat familiar. I started teaching more, simplifying the way I spoke so that students could understand. I ate buckets of açaí (a sugary sorbet from a berry fruit in the Amazonas) and read my books in the sun.
I was told to be careful, you’re a gringo, you look like a gringo, you act like a gringo, be careful. I started teaching in people’s houses and when they’d see me waiting in my parked car, they’d usher me in, telling me never to do that again, that it was dangerous, that my car could be robbed, that I could be taken in the car to the closest ATM, the list went on. I smiled and nodded but that danger was abstract and so distant to anything I knew that I could not comprehend it fully.
I’d wait for Cíntia to come home. They work long hours in Brazil but the loneliness I felt gave way to anxiety. I’d overthink everything in the silence. I’d try to catch something on her face when she returned, a sign of regret, or betrayal, but it was just her, tired and happy. We were so proud of our tiny box apartment that looked out on an electricity substation. We were finally together and, although not everything seemed possible, what was possible was worth it because we had made it.
We had a small homemade wedding six months after I arrived. I thanked my best friend, Cíntia’s grandma, in a speech of broken Portuguese. A laptop Skyped my parents in, a phone Skyped my brother in, and another my sister. Looking back, we were so young, delightfully naive, and full of belief.
I struggled through the language and often felt unknown. I was never quick enough with words to show wit, never had the right word to make a joke. And it was impossible to open up in this other language. When I started my PhD in creative writing and literary theory, through Portuguese, in 2013 at PUCRS, a leading university in the south of Brazil, I was quiet, would never raise my hand, would walk from classroom to classroom, pretending to be listening to music or on the phone.
It was the first time in my life I experienced this. As a complete extrovert, who hates his own company, this only made me feel more lost. When Cíntia first met my classmates, they told her how shy I was, how quiet. She looked at me in disbelief.
Slowly, excruciatingly, I found myself, started to feel like I belonged again. I opened my own language school, finished my PhD, we bought an apartment, saved a dog, then a cat, then our first daughter Aurora was born, then our second, Luna Faye, and all the time our life was tumbling out before us.
It happened quickly and I was left without my phone and wallet, but they took something else too – a future was robbed, another life in Brazil, where we stayed and were happy
Life was easy there. It was only the distance to home that made it difficult. The longing I had to see my family and friends, to be back in Ireland. Take that away, life was fun. We had brilliant, smart, funny friends. My wife’s parents, whose company I enjoyed and who helped so much with the girls. I had a funky, unusual language school that served beer and prosecco and held musical events, and offered English through film, English through poetry; my students were curious, kind and many of them became wonderful friends. Our days were full of great food, sunshine, amazing wine, and we were genuinely happy, content.
We could have stayed forever but I felt, had always felt, this call to home. To Ireland. I may very well have ignored it completely if I hadn’t been robbed.
I was going to the bank, walking quickly underneath an umbrella against the thunderstorm, when something cold was pushed to my neck, and two men patiently led me into the quietness of the park. The knife was forced sharp and heavy against my neck and I felt very hot and very cold. I asked them to just leave my identity card and they pushed the knife harder, drawing speckles of blood, telling me another word and they’d kill me.
It happened quickly and I was left without my phone and wallet, but they took something else too – a future was robbed, another life in Brazil, where we stayed and were happy. Cíntia, who herself had been robbed at gunpoint, found my being robbed too difficult. She felt a responsibility, that on some level anything bad that would happen would be her fault.
It took us a long time to come to the decision to leave Brazil. I often think it unfair that we can’t live multiple lives simultaneously, and leaving that life behind was the toughest thing we’ve done.
To leave often felt like losing, like whatever I had set out to achieve could only come through staying. I was afraid of being seen as a failure, but more so was worried that the person I had become would stay there and I’d have to find myself all over again. The ease to that person, the quiet confidence, the ability to exist without constantly questioning everything they think, would forever be stuck, in that place, at that time.
I worried that I would not fit back in. That my friends would have too changed, and that in the slight changes along the years, we would have become too different, what existed between us would seem infantile and belonging to another time.
My wife and I packed up our lives in the strangest of times and got ready to return ‘home’ with a baby, a toddler, a dog and a cat. We were those people on a plane you didn’t want to sit next to you. Flights changed, were cancelled, everything was up in the air until the moment we sat on the first flight, and even then we weren’t sure we’d make any of the connecting flights.
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When we did arrive in Cork, the welcome home I had imagined was quite the anticlimax. My parents moved out of their house so we could quarantine. We spoke between masks and windows. We held up Luna Faye, not yet one, and watched as my parents reached their hands out to the glass.
Almost four years back and I still miss the life I had there, the person I had become. The long, sunny days, the clay tennis courts, the barbecues, the mangos, the beaches and canyons, my friends, my students. It all became so complete and I too, felt complete.
It is hard calling anywhere home now, when there is this other place that holds something of me, this unnamed thing that I long for. Or maybe that is just the past, and we always want for it, for what it meant, then, there, to be so alive with so much yet to happen.
Patrick Holloway’s debut novel The Language Of Remembering is published by Epoque Press
